Hi,
We're a small business that offers technical training courses to customers for an ERP software package and I'm currently in the process of creating some VMs using Azure DevTest Labs to use as Training instances. This allows me to spin up environments as required for participants on courses and then throw them away when finished with, to be recreated fresh when needed again.
One aspect that I'm struggling to get to grips with is how to licence MS Office in this situation. As part of the training users will need access to Excel and possibly Word to use associated add-ins from the ERP solution, but as office now requires activation and may be limited on the number of concurrent installs it allows I can't find any licencing scheme that will suit our need.
Primarily courses will be 2-5 days with normally around 6 participants. With 2 trainers it's possible that we could run 2 courses simultaneously which could see maybe 14-16 environments needed at the same time, but we may only run a couple of courses a month so I don't really want to have to pay for upwards of 20 office subscriptions a month on the off chance we may only need them for a couple of days. I also don't want to have participants or trainers juggling usernames or activating software when trying to log on, I just want to spin up a VM for them, give them the windows login for that machine and everything is ready.
All other licencing is covered via the Azure image itself and other agreements, it's purely the access to Excel and Word that is causing a problem.
Many Thanks
Pete
